Christmas celebrations

Well, now that we're nearing the end of Hamburg's winter break I suppose I should take some time out to actually write about it! At first I was a little sad to not be celebrating with family this Christmas season, but the surrogate families that I've found here in Germany were more than willing to take me in and let me celebrate with them, which I was exceptionally grateful for.

Christmas Eve ("Der Heiligabend," or the holy evening around here) I spent with one of the teachers at my school, Ute, and her family. All assembled were Ute, her husband, a couple sisters in law, grandpa, and Ute's two children Gerthe and Jasna, who I think were 3 and 5 respectively. Unlike in the USA, Germans actually do their celebrating and gift opening on the night of the 24'th, so the atmosphere around the house with two little kids opening up presents was pretty exciting. I brought over a bottle of wine and some flowers for Ute, and in return I got a book of short stories (always grateful for German reading material, great way to learn new words). Germans also light their trees with actual little candles situated on the ends of branches and held to the tree with clamps, which gave me a bit of a shock when I walked in and saw it for the first time, but thankfully nothing burned down.

Gerthe and Jasna were particularly excited to have me around, and after dinner they brought me some books out of their toy room and asked me to read for them, which--believe me--was super precious. The first book they brought me, though, was actually really challenging, ironically enough. The hardest thing about German for me is just pronouncing words, and the book (I forget the name) was about zoo animals getting onto a train, which went alphabetically from A to Z. Each page was full of these really terrible and confusing alliterations and rhymes and other such linguistic tricks and twists which are no problem for actual Germans, but bring non-native speakers such as myself to their knees. They got a kick out of the trouble I had with it anyway (as did their parents), so I suppose that will be a particularly memorable iteration out of the thousands of times they'll probably have Ute read the story to them. After that we read a story about a gorilla letting animals out of their cages at a zoo (they're big into zoos I guess), and thankfully that one wasn't as hard. The rest of the evening was spent sitting around the kitchen table and chatting, showing everyone where Ithaca and Salt Lake City are on the atlas, and attending a midnight service at a church around the corner, where Ute was playing violin for the orchestra.

Christmas day went well too! It was a bit strange waking up alone in my and Loic's section of the house, and I had forgotten to go shopping before the holidays, so breakfast on Christmas morning consisted of spaghetti with butter (didn't have the luxury of tomato sauce unfortunately), but aside for that everything went fine. I recorded a bunch of little videos for all of my friends this year to say hello and see how things are going, so I spent most of the morning doing that. At 3:00 I headed up to the Ketels' place to have a holiday lunch with them and some of their family friends, and, as always, it was really good to see them again and spend a little time with them. After I was finished with that I headed home and called it a night.

Anyway, have another post on winter break itself coming up, as well as a little something about New Year's Eve in Hamburg, so stay tuned for that!